Australia live news updates: 36 Covid deaths in Victoria, 31 in NSW; police attempt to clear ACT anti-vaccine protest camp

Protesters in Canberra are now slowly filing out of their unauthorised camp site as police gradually move their line through the area. Some holdout stragglers are still standing firm and staring down police, but most are packing up and driving out – destination unknown.

From talking to a few protesters, there seems to be a fair bit of confusion in the campers and on their online groups after the camp got rumbled. Some are talking about new rally in Canberra today; some are looking for a new campsite (with police on loudspeakers recommending people try one of the city’s “family-friendly” legal campsites), while some plan to cruise the city all day blasting their horns in their vehicles.

Others are talking optimistically about further protests on Saturday, with further “convoy” demonstrators expected to arrive today and tomorrow.

The assistant attorney general, Amanda Stoker, has muddied the waters about whether LGBTQ+ students will be protected at the same time as the religious discrimination bill potentially passes federal parliament.

Despite the prime minister, Scott Morrison, suggesting on Thursday amendments to protect LGBTQ+ students would be contained in the same set of bills, Stoker said on Friday the Sex Discrimination Act “shouldn’t be changed unless we know the final form of the religious discrimination bill”.

Stoker’s intervention comes ahead of the release of two inquiry reports.

Stakeholders think Labor will join the Coalition in joint reports for both, calling for the religious discrimination bills to be considered for passage through parliament, although Labor will also express concerns about hiring and firing powers and the contentious statements of belief clause.

You can read the full report below:

“They were all saying she was coming home,” Bec Rees says. Her mother, Sue, had gone into hospital in Melbourne with a burst ear drum. She also had cancer.

Then she got Covid. She didn’t come home.

Sue Rees was 74, and when she died on 8 January she became one of more than 1,500 deaths reported in Australia in this latest surge of the global pandemic.

As Australia’s death toll grows, we know very little about who has died. Daily press conferences reveal the rising number, often accompanied by the disclaimer that those who died had “underlying conditions”.

You can read the rest of Tory Shepherd’s beautiful story about Sue Rees below:

ACT police have moved in on a makeshift camp illegally set up by anti-vaccine protesters in Canberra, demanding demonstrators move on from their spot outside the National Library.

Hundreds of protesters had parked cars and camper vans, or set up tents and swags, on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin on Monday, ahead of a week-long series of rallies against vaccine mandates and Covid rules. Other protesters had a grab-bag of other grievances, from calling for the resignation of politicians, or supporting the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory and falsely claiming certain public officials were paedophiles.

The camp had set up portable toilets, communal cooking and eating facilities, and entertainment areas to play music and games.

Following an attempt to move campers on Wednesday, police had flagged further action on Friday morning. Around 7am, a large number of police – including some in riot gear – began broadcasting orders to leave on loudspeakers. At 8.30am, police began gradually advancing and dismantling structures like tents and shades.

Protesters with their own loudspeakers refused to leave, encouraging their supporters to “hold your ground”. But others began packing their sites and leaving in their vehicles. The majority of protesters made no attempts to leave, playing The Last Post and I Am Australian on their own PA systems.

“Protest peacefully. Do not give the police any reason to turn on us. We are not criminals,” one protester told supporters on a loudspeaker.

“Park the vehicles up somewhere else and get back here.”

You’ll recall that earlier this week we received the annual dump of donations data from the Australian Electoral Commission. It told us, among other things, that Anthony Pratt’s Pratt Holdings was the biggest political donor in the last year, tipping $1.3m into Liberal party coffers ahead of the 2022 election.

But there’s a lot the AEC’s data doesn’t tell us.

New analysis from the Centre for Public Integrity estimates that $68m in party income came from an unknown source in 2020-21. That’s almost 40% of total party income.

Experts call this “dark money”. It’s party income that we know about, due to the party’s reporting obligations, but cannot explain.

The analysis suggests that, since 1999, the Coalition has received $757.8m in dark money, while Labor has received $433.9m. Centre for Public Integrity director Geoffrey Watson said:

This secrecy needs to stop. The last election set records for money raised and money hidden. Reform is needed now so that the funding of the coming election is transparent. Voters deserve to know who is funding our political parties now, not nine months after they vote. The commonwealth has the weakest donation laws in the country. Most states have a disclosure threshold of $1,000. The commonwealth’s disclosure threshold of $14,500 is out of line and leads to the transparency void into which almost $1.4bn has fallen since 1999.